Web Design

Insider Tips On Writing For Findability

Last updated Sep 29, 2006.

By Dave Taylor

Do you ever wonder why some Web pages get terrific results with search
engines while others are doomed to obscurity—even though it seems like the
more obscure pages actually have better information? While there are all sorts
of tricks for boosting your search engine results placement (SERP); I’m
going to focus on just one of them—how to write to maximize
findability.

Wait, I can hear you asking, "What's findability?" In a
nutshell, it's the techniques that you need to use to ensure that your Web
pages are both search engine friendly and designed to gain maximal relevance for
the keyword or keywords you target.

Let me give you an example to clarify. Let's say that you wanted to
promote your car wash through blogging. Now, imagine that after a day of work
you're inspired to write an article about smart approaches to avoid leaks
on convertible cars. It's relevant, interesting, and valuable
information.

The majority of bloggers would title this article something like "stop
leaks!" or "that darn drip" or "avoiding drip damage"
or similar. For that matter, most bloggers would probably title the car wash
blog something like "shiny clean blog" or "wax and polish
blog" too. Cute, amusing, but ...

What's wrong with that approach? People who are searching for
information about avoiding leaks when taking their convertible through a car
wash aren't going to be searching for "wax and polish" or
"that darn drip." By choosing your titles poorly, you’re hurting
your findability, which means that you’re destined to have less traffic,
even if your content is splendid.

By contrast, imagine if you had the "Beverly Hills Car Wash and Wax
Blog" (for extra credit, give it a subtitle like "The celebrity car
wash with all the hot gossip!"). I bet you're already interested in
reading it, aren't you? It’s going to catch someone's eye if
they bump into it on a blogroll or search results page. Next, title the new
article, "How to avoid leaks when running your convertible through our car
wash." It’s a bit less sexy, but it's a whole lot more findable,
isn't it?

At its most basic, then, findability dictates that you should try to put
yourself in the shoes of someone who is searching the Web for the information
you plan on publishing. If not, it's like building a beautiful restaurant
many miles from the closest road. Nice, but no traffic!

Taking Findability To The Next Level

If you really want to get serious about this topic, however, I find it
invaluable to do some rudimentary keyword research. A quick demonstration: Do
people search for "cellphone" or "cell phone" more
often?

If one is used in searches 10x more often, wouldn't it just be smart to
use that more frequently in your writing, even if you personally prefer the
other form of the word?

In fact, "cell phone" is used in searches seven times as
often as "cellphone." When I learned that, I actually changed one
of the category names in my
AskDaveTaylor Tech Support
blog!

So, how do you do this sort of research? It's surprisingly easy with
some of the slick new tools available online. One way is to simply sign up for a
Google AdWords account, which has some internal tools that let you get rough
data. I find AdWords extraordinarily complex in the back-end, however, so I
recommend a few different sites.

To get started with keyword research, try
Nichebot.com.
Sticking with our example, what do you think is more commonly used in a search:
"car wash" or "carwash"? Nichebot gives "carwash"
a frequency score of just over 20,000 and "car wash" as two words a
frequency score of over 200,000. Conclusion: "car wash" is going to be
10x more useful to increase findability than "carwash," even if the
big sign in front says "Beverly Hills Carwash."

For more sophisticated searches that include related keyword suggestions,
Yahoo!'s Overture service is particularly good. You can start with its
Keyword Selector Tool,
which suggests the following searches related to "carwash": "car
wash Chicago," "car wash los angeles," and, my favorite,
"bikini car wash." No kidding, that last one was a Yahoo search over
4,000 times in the month of August alone. What a world, eh?

Switch to "car wash" and it reveals that that phrase was included
in Yahoo searches over 182,000 times just in the month of August. There are a
lot of people looking for car wash information online. Who knew?

Avoid Keyword Spamming

Having espoused the benefits of being keyword savvy when writing your content
to maximize your findability, let me hasten to add that having too many keywords
is a very bad thing.

In the fuzzy world of search engine optimization, adding too many keywords to
a Web page is known as "keyword spamming." Although the name might be
vaguely cute, the result is that you can easily be penalized by search engines
or even kicked out entirely.

I hope you can see that this is rather nauseating and certainly something we,
as humans, would read with great skepticism. Thankfully, the search engines
would also catch this as a serious problem and potentially cause trouble for the
business. (Oh, and don't worry about us at InformIT: Most keyword spam has
the same keyword repeated again and again and again, far more than what I'm
demonstrating here).

And, In The End, Just Do Right

I realize that I'm not giving you any exact figures here, any quantified
specifics that detail what keyword density is too much, what ratio of keywords
to non-keywords is best for titles or the content of a blog or Web page, but
that's because there is no definitive answer.

Instead, I suggest that you use what I call the "read aloud test."
Write your article or blog entry, then simply read it out loud to yourself. Does
it sound horribly stilted, like some slimy salesman hyper-aggressively pitching
a product? Does it sound like someone with a full-word stutter? Does it sound
just plain daft? Then you've gone too far!

But don't be afraid to experiment with synonyms, common misspellings,
and related. It can yield surprising results. In fact, here's an example of
this research as it applies to a blog entry:

As you read it, be alert to synonymous uses of phrases like "background
style," "background code," and "background picture."
Nothing too unpleasant, nothing overt, but I did spend a bit of time ensuring
that the article will be maximally findable so that it can help the most people
possible.

Well, that's it for this month. I hope this helps you think about one
important facet of your online writing style and improves your findability.